This looks like a Byzantine Emperor's performance. Does anyone remember caesaropapism which kept the Eastern Roman Empire going strong for a 1000 years after Rome was overcome? The gifting of Obama maybe this performance ability.

As David pointed out, this is an official White House photograph, not one from the press. So, I think that we can lay off the media here, even though I do agree that, in many ways, Obama has been preferred by the media.

All official photographers tend to create dramatic presentations of their presidents. I can't imagine that the Obama photographer would be any different. (Remember the famous pic of JFK looking out the Oval Office window, both hands leaning against his credenza, slightly slumped? The unspoken caption might have been, "Burdened by Being Leader of the Free World." But he might as well have been thinking, "I think I'll have ham salad for lunch.")

By the way, as to Lincoln, anyone who has read the record will also know that while he was certainly no 21st-century person, Lincoln's attitudes about race underwent marked changes during his time in the White House. He underwent many changes in those four-plus years.

The red and gold is kind of ridiculous - as it is with all Presidents, but I suppose you can't have the President walking through a hall with less pomp than a C-list celebrity.

If we had to have a celebrity President in my lifetime I would have preferred Steve Jobs - just to see the sleek aesthetic makeover he'd likely mastermind would be worth it on its own. I can't see him tolerating red and gold for long.

Isn't this just a photographer doing what photographers do. Not fawning, not wacky.

As a white house photographer you spend day in and day out shooting the same guy, in largely the same spaces. As was pointed out above, the holy grail is to shoot that "iconic" image, which would live on as the visual definition of an era. So you're always looking for some interesting angle or juxtaposition. You might look for scenes that have certain formal structures or a nicely balanced composition, or interesting textures or patterns.

Ann, you're a good amateur photographer (which is not damning with faint praise from me, because that's the most I would say about myself as well). Can't you imagine standing there waiting for the President to come by, thinking "how am I gonna shoot this in an interesting way", seeing that statue there and thinking, "Maybe I can use this to create something visually interesting."?

I certainly can.

Is there a political subtext to the choice of the statue? Probably. Especially if there are plenty of other statues in that same hallway that could have been used. If the photographer had done the same shot with a statue of Warren G. Harding, would we all be talking about it?

David:I have zero problem with having White House photographers. It would be nice, for example, to have photographs from the Cabinet session at which Lincoln first read the Emancipation Proclamation. Or when Chester Alan Arthur let his former Stalwart allies he was going to back civil service reform. I'm glad that we have White House pictures from the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Yes, these photographers engage in a bit of aggrandizing of their primary subjects. And every president has been a narcissist. (They wouldn't have made it to the presidency if they weren't somewhat narcissistic. And by the way, I think that many bloggers, including me, suffer from a bit of narcissism.) That aside, I'm glad to have images of these narcissists as they go about their work.

But it simply is impossible to have more than a few folks around to record candid moments in the life of a presidential term. White House photographers aren't just letting us see White House events closely, they're creating an important record for history. Both of those aims seem like a good use of my tax dollars to me.